The Shadow of Silence: A COVID-19

#Public Health Literature #COVID-19 Stories #Psychological Fiction #Contemporary Literature #Pandemic Narratives

Guest of Silence

The twilight light spreading across the village sky softens the surroundings. The sound of birds gradually fading away in the distance. And that silence gradually covers Shantipur...

1. Arrival

The village of Shantipur is surrounded by miles of greenery, where neighbors are each other's companions in joy and sorrow. Mrs. Elizabeth returned from New York in March 2020. The elderly and aristocratic Elizabeth was always conscious of her clothes, food, and speech. But after returning from the city, she seemed to have changed. She would spend most of the day sitting on the veranda, staring open-eyed at the distant deserted field. Whenever anyone asked her anything, she would say in a soft voice—

"They are coming... no one can see them, but I can see them."

Initially, the villagers thought that the mechanical life of the city and the pressure of Covid-19 might have mentally upset her. But as the days went by, a few other residents of the village started behaving abnormally. Without any obvious physical symptoms, they stopped talking.

2. The Contagion of Silence

In the afternoon, the Roberts' youngest son, Jacob, was sitting next to his mother. A week ago, the lively boy now sits like a stone statue. He does not respond to his parents' calls, only staring at the banyan tree behind the house. Doctor Joseph came and examined him and said, "Physically, the boy is completely healthy. But it's as if the door to his mind has closed. No test can find the cause."

Doctor Joseph frowned and said, "It's not Covid, it's... something else."

As the days passed, more and more people in the village fell victim to this strange condition. They sit silently during the day, mumble in their sleep at night, and draw incomprehensible symbols on the ground—a complex combination of triangles, circles, and curved lines.

3. The return of ancient terror

The village's oldest resident, 95-year-old Williamson, known to everyone as 'Uncle Will', sat on his veranda one evening and said, "This has happened before. Even in 1918, when the Spanish flu broke out, people in this village suddenly stopped talking. My grandfather used to say, it was called a 'shadow disease'. It attacks the soul, not the body. It's not a virus floating in the air, it's... a shadow that comes with the breath..."

People laughed at first, but the number of people who fell silent kept increasing. There was a strange emptiness in their eyes, as if there was no soul in the body, just an empty shell.

4. Sarah and Michael's investigation

Two young people from the village, Sarah Jenkins and Michael Thompson, who had returned to the village from Kolkata to study psychology and journalism respectively due to the lockdown, began researching this mysterious phenomenon. Sarah wrote in her diary that all the affected people had the same dream—a dark, circular room, where a shadowy figure whispered:

"Be silent... Give me your language, I will live in you."

Sarah wrote in her research, "It's not just a virus, it's a psycho-viral syndrome. Covid-19 attacks the body, and these unknown symptoms attack the mind. In reality, the scenes of mundane horror movies—silence, invisible presence, fear of death—all these are entering the unconscious part of the mind."

5. Covid vs. the shadow virus

Michael found on the Internet that similar incidents had occurred in several other remote areas of the world. He said, "Just as Covid enters the body by grabbing the ACE2 receptor, this 'shadow infection' takes refuge in places of fear in the mind. Where lockdowns in cities have created physical distance, here lockdowns have created psychological isolation."

One morning, Mrs. Elizabeth suddenly reached out to her shadow in the sun and said—

"I know you can hear me. You're inside me now, aren't you?"

6. The Search for Resistance

Sarah and Michael realized that the only way to get sound back was to organize a 'talking festival' with the villagers. Everyone was asked to tell their life stories, their laughter stories, their memories—everything.

At first, the villagers were silent. But after three days, the elderly Mrs. Jones began to tell the story of her first love in her youth—how she still carefully kept her husband's first gift, a red handkerchief. Then Mr. Robinson told the story of his first bicycle ride. One by one, words began to return to people's mouths.

A week later, little Jacob also began to speak—

"I'm not afraid anymore. The shadow doesn't call me anymore."

7. Conclusion

When the elements of a horror movie are mixed with reality—virus, silence, invisible presence—the boundaries between story and reality are blurred. This experience in Shantipur village teaches us that we can fight physical illness with medicine, but we have to fight mental terror with words, stories, and relationships.

Covid-19 taught us to maintain physical distance, but this experience taught us—when we lose our voice, we are not only sick, we lose our humanity. When silence consumes us, our stories save us.

“The word of love is greater than fear,” Sarah wrote on the last page of her study, “when an invisible virus stifles our voice, the courage to tell stories sets us free.”

#HorrorStory #PandemicLiterature #SupernaturalStory #RuralLife #GhostStory #Psychological_Horror #Folk_Horror #SocialIsolation #MythicFiction #RealworldHorror #StreamofConsciousness #Folklore #ModernFolklore #CrisisLiterature